Through Caverns Measureless to Man: Exploring Quang Binh Province

11 Thursday Feb 2021

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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Upon awakening from an unrestful sleep, perturbed by his ever roaming mind and a good hit of opium, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote these lines in a burst of creative inspiration. He may have been dreaming of Vietnam’s Quang Binh province when he wrote them.

Certainly for me, the landscape and geology of Quang Binh province have come closest to the natural realization of the romantic chasms and caves of ice in “Kubla Khan”. The area is a dense jungle in shades of green, with tall vine-entwined trees and foliage forming a thick canopy that conceals hundreds of caverns and the streams and rivers that course through them. Continue reading →

No Colours of Green Fields: Inside the caves of Phong Nha

11 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by itsaphanlife in Travels within Vietnam

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Part 1 of the trip is here: Through Caverns Measureless to Man

…through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

from The Prelude, by William Wordswoth

Wordsworth saw mountains as reminders of the divine, links for the human mind to the heavens, fearsome conduits. These “huge and mighty forms” loomed over and overwhelmed his childhood self, troubling his dreams, but they also cracked open his childhood imagination, expanding his interiority just as water flows through limestone to form grand spaces. The Romantics were drawn to mountains, seeing them as the fearsome sublime, beings that remind us of our small existence in a gargantuan world.

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